Chris Hedges's Blog, page 624

Trump Expresses Confidence in EPA Chief as Questions Linger

WASHINGTON — White House officials sounded increasingly doubtful Thursday about the future of embattled Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt, even as President Trump appeared to throw him a public lifeline.

Trump, asked if he still has confidence in Pruitt while boarding Air Force One, responded: “I do.”

That was contrasted by more tepid remarks from White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley, who told Fox News: “I can’t speak to the future of Scott Pruitt.”

“They say we all serve at the pleasure of the president,” Gidley later told reporters. “If he’s not pleased you’ll know it. … The president himself said he had confidence (in Pruitt), and so that’s where we stand today.”

Trump has publicly expressed support for other administration officials who were fired or resigned, right up until sending tweets announcing their departure.

A review of Pruitt’s ethical conduct by White House officials is underway, adding to other probes already being conducted by congressional oversight committees and EPA’s inspector general into outsize spending on luxury air travel and unusual security precautions.

Questions about Pruitt’s longevity in Washington have swirled since news first broke last week about his rental of a bargain-priced Capitol Hill condo with ties to a fossil fuels lobbyist.

Late Wednesday, an EPA ethics official said he wasn’t provided the full facts when he ruled last week that Pruitt’s $50-a-night rental was not an ethics violation.

EPA lawyer Kevin Minoli said his finding that Pruitt was paying fair-market value was based on the assumption that Pruitt occupied only one bedroom for $50 a night, as outlined in the lease.

Media reports later disclosed that Pruitt’s college-aged daughter occupied a second bedroom in the unit while she interned at the White House last summer. Minoli said he did not consider the value of a second room in his analysis.

Pruitt paid about $1,000 a month, less than a third of what Minoli’s review found nearby two-bedroom homes listed for.

“Some have raised questions whether the actual use of the space was consistent with the terms of the lease,” Minoli wrote. “Evaluating those questions would have required factual information that was not before us and the review does not address those questions.”

The Associated Press obtained a copy of Minoli’s letter, which was first reported by CNN.

Pruitt had gone on the offensive Wednesday, trying to shore up his position in a series of interviews with Fox News and conservative media outlets during which he continued to suggest he had lived alone.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Wednesday that Trump is not OK with some of the details that have emerged, including news this week of enormous raises awarded to two of Pruitt’s closest aides. In a combative Fox News interview, Pruitt said he didn’t approve the raises and doesn’t know who did. His performance was panned by White House insiders.

Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York on Thursday became the third House Republican to say Pruitt should go, joining a growing chorus of Democrats and environmentalists. She was speaking to about 200 constituents in her home district.

Amid the ethics cloud, one of Pruitt’s closest aides has resigned. Samantha Dravis served as his senior counsel and associate administrator for policy. EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman said Thursday that Dravis, 34, was leaving to pursue other opportunities.

Dravis previously worked for a fundraising group founded by Pruitt before being hired at EPA. She often accompanied the administrator on his frequent trips across the country and oversees.

An EPA employee told the AP on Wednesday that Dravis had not been attending meetings inside the agency in recent weeks and was recently informed she would not be accompanying Pruitt on a planned trip to Portugal. The source was not authorized to publicly discuss personnel matters and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The condo rented by Pruitt is co-owned by the wife of J. Steven Hart, chairman and CEO of the powerhouse lobbying firm Williams & Jensen.

On Pruitt’s lease, a copy of which was reviewed by AP, Steven Hart’s name was originally typed in as “landlord” but was scratched out. The name of his wife, health care lobbyist Vicki Hart, was scribbled in.

Federal disclosure reports show Hart’s firm lobbied EPA, including Pruitt himself, extensively over the past year.

The Associated Press reported last week that while living in the Hart condo he met in his EPA office with a lobbyist from Hart’s firm and two executives from an energy company seeking to scuttle tighter pollution standards for coal-fired power plants.

EPA also granted a favorable ruling to a pipeline company represented by Hart’s firm.

Beyond the question of whether Pruitt paid a fair-market value for the rental, Hart’s business interests potentially raise other ethics issues that Minoli said he did not consider as part of his earlier review of whether the favorable lease constituted an improper gift to Pruitt from the lobbyist.

Ethics rules covering federal officials say they must remain impartial when making regulatory decisions and can’t show favoritism. Pruitt also signed an ethics pledge when joining the Trump administration in which he promised not to accept gifts from lobbyists.

“I think it was very poor judgment for Pruitt to rent a place owned by a lobbyist who describes him as only a casual friend,” said Walter Shaub, who ran the federal Office of Government Ethics before quitting last year after clashing with Trump. “My biggest concern centers on the question of whether he may have met with anyone from the lobbyist’s firm while staying there, which would implicate the impartiality regulation.”

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Associated Press reporters Zeke Miller and Jonathan Lemire contributed to this report.

The Truth About Martin Luther King’s Assassination

Editor’s note: This article first ran on The Ghion Journal on Jan. 18. We are rerunning it on Truthdig to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination on April 4, 1968. James Earle Ray initially confessed to the murder, but King’s family believes he was framed.

I was all set to write an article today about the way our society is always hoodwinked by the establishment. I wanted to highlight the alliance between mainstream media, the political class and institutions of higher learning and discuss the compact these walled off societies have among each other to present altered narratives as established facts to the ever willing public. My intention was to engender a conversation about the way we accept conventional “wisdom” without questioning what and why we are being sold what we are being told. After all, history is really nothing more than the propaganda of winners written with the blood of the defeated.

Suddenly, I was hit with an epiphany of sorts. While I was at work and reflecting on the life and death of Martin Luther King—given today is a day to remember his legacy—an ah ha moment suddenly hit me. I realized that there is always a pattern of how prophets who speak for the people are murdered by those who oppress the masses. There is a three step approach that the status quo uses to silence the bearers of peace and justice. So I scrapped my weekly segment in order to present the blueprint that has been followed by despots since biblical times to our present moment.

Step 1: Pay someone to kill the messenger. Flip through the history books and you will find that money has always been the source of injustice and the lure that was used to entice a conspirator to kill on behalf of their benefactor. From shekels to dollars, cash has always been used to employ Judases to bury truth tellers. Everyone has a price; it is astounding what humans are capable of when given enough incentives by way of currency or proximity to power. It is due to this latent greed that is part and parcel of the human condition that tyrants with enough wealth can use their affluence and influence to weaponize citizens into assassins. This is why Lee Harvey Oswald kept saying, “I’m just a patsy” while he was being interrogated after the death of John F. Kennedy.

Contrary to mainstream propaganda, there was a wider conspiracy to eliminate JFK. Yet history blames a lone gunman even though were copious motives that powerful people within and outside of government had to kill our 35th president. One of the most profound, yet least mentioned, speeches Kennedy gave was about the dangers of closed societies who govern without accountability and through secrecy. This was a direct challenge to the very oligarchy who use extortion and subversion to destabilize nations and oppress the masses. I embedded the video above this paragraph, but let me quote a specific excerpt from the speech that stands out and speaks to the valor Kennedy displayed in speaking against the invisible hands of those who use the guise of Democracy to subjugate humanity away from the public conscience. In his speech before the American Newspaper Publishers Association on April 27, 1961, Kennedy noted:

It requires a change in outlook, a change in tactics, a change in missions—by the government, by the people, by every businessman or labor leader, and by every newspaper. For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence—on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.

Kennedy made a bold decision to speak against the hidden bureaucracies and the plutocracy who empower them; for his courageous act he was met with the mendacity of a bullet. We will never know who the ordered the killing or who conspired to assassinate Kennedy, the lies are too many and the theories too abundant for us to ever get to the bottom of the truth. But the first step toward discovering truth is to know that you are being lied to. There is a reason, of course, why those entrusted with power partake in such pervasive disinformation. If we really knew the truth about what our government is doing in our names and the ways we are being oppressed even as we are given the pretenses of freedom, there would be another 1776 before tomorrow’s sunset.

I’m pretty sure I’m not breaking news to people who have this thing called cognition and I’m definitely not presenting a revelation for those who can actually think for themselves. The official narrative of one shooter pulling off one of the most brazen acts in the history of America is complete bunk. The Warren Commission was not a fact finding mission, it was a truth burying expedition. We found out in our own lifetime that Blue Ribbon Commissions are nothing more than White Washing Conspiracies; government convening “experts” to uncover the truth about government is like a wolf hiring a jackal to guard the chicken coop.

Lies are exotic, truth is pretty basic. Kennedy spoke against the hustle of hustlers and for that choice he was given a death sentence. The truth is that a coup d’état occurred on November 22, 1963 and money was at the root of Kennedy’s execution. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were killed for the same reason; they were fine as long as they talked about injustice through a one-dimensional lens. But both Malcolm and Martin changed at the last stage of their lives. Malcolm X came back from Mecca and disavowed his fiery rhetoric and started to agitate for universal justice. Likewise, Martin Luther King stopped speaking about just the “black” cause and started to speak up against the Vietnam War and tried to lead a movement of poor people irrespective of their color.

Both Martin and Malcolm were targeted by the FBI’s COINTELPRO, a program dedicated to eradicating “black” leaders who were pushing for self-empowerment and human rights. For having the audacity to speak against state-sponsored terror, they were targeted with extreme harassment and duress way before Judases were hired to kill them. Their fates were sealed when they tried to advocate for all and started to focus on economic injustice instead of social justice alone. They threatened the hustle of hustlers. This is a common theme since Genesis and the dawn of civilizations. In the age of rampant social justice and unending protests, notice how the demagogues who are always pretending to speak for us never talk about economic justice and how they rile us into antagonism by purveying the “us versus them” rhetoric. That is because they are paid agents of the very system they are speaking against. True revolutionaries and prophets who stand for peace don’t get their own TV shows, and they damn sure don’t get elected president.

Step 2. Which leads to step two in how the rich and powerful silence people who speak up for justice. The next step is to turn prophets into mythical heroes. This is done for many reasons, chief among which is to elevate the messenger in order to diminish the message. Even from a biblical perspective, the story of Jesus has been turned into a saga and rarely do people with authority—from preachers to politicians—speak about the message Yeshua was speaking.

How can they when they are trading money in temples and using their status to oppress the masses; they would be condemning themselves if they focused on His teachings. Same playbook of eradicate and elevate has been deployed for centuries. The MLK we are being presented with today is nothing like the “radical” Martin Luther King who spoke out against the excesses of our economic system. The media-politico class and establishment intelligentsia would rather we focus on his “I have a dream speech” and present King as a one-dimensional mythical hero. They erased the King who tried to unite “white” and “black” to stand against their common oppressors.

There is another reason why heroes are turned into mythical icons. The truth is that people like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy and my ancestor King Tewodros II were all flawed human beings. They had their weaknesses and they made plenty of mistakes. But at their core, irrespective of their defects, they were compassionate and had their hearts set on justice. By killing them and turning them into superheroes, their killers are hoping to convince us that we can’t be like them. All of us can be Martin Luther King, King Tewodros II or any of the historical legends we look up to; they are humans just like us and we are just us powerful as them. If we choose, we too can change the world. But we are so programmed to believe that we are powerless that we would rather bow to idols instead of rising up to be heroes ourselves.

Step 3. The last step is to invert the legacies of these once prophets into the polar opposite of who they actually were. The rich kill first, then they own narratives. They do so through propaganda and institutional disinformation. It goes back to money and power, professors pass along lies because they don’t want to lose their jobs, politicians dare not speak against deception if they want to keep their seats and media personalities swallow their tongues or else risk getting blackballed. An implicit agreement is thus arrived at. It is better to pass along lies than to challenge accepted untruths. Those who find the courage to say “the emperor has no clothes on” and speak against the lies of the system are immediately labeled kooks and marginalized. If they speak up too loudly and garner a bit too much of a following, they might end up getting the Lumumba treatment.

There are two ways the legacies of murdered prophets are inverted. One is to lionize them as I noted above and turn them into mythical legends. The other way is to demonize them and tar them as the next coming of Lucifer. King Tewodros II comes to mind for personal reasons. For more than a century, imperialists have been gunning for the king of Ethiopia who is beloved by millions in the country of my birth. They have spewed venom about his tyranny and maliciousness because he had the temerity to stand up against colonizers.

If not for King Tewodros, Ethiopia would not have been able to defy occupiers and become the first “African” nation to defeat a would-be colonial power at the Battle of Adwa. The same invisible hands that John F. Kennedy mentioned—who use deception and cunning to destabilize the world—were the ones who were behind the death of King Tewodros. The invisible hands proved to belong to Queen Victoria when she kidnapped King Tewodros’s son Alemayehu Tewodros after ransoming Atse Yohannes—a fellow Ethiopian—to betray the king who unified Ethiopia. Atse Tewodros II died a free man in Magdala rather than accept colonial imposition. His defiance birthed Adwa thirty years later.

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A Case of Selective Justice



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There is a common theme through all these narratives. The aristocracy are cunning; they always send someone to do their dirty deed only to swoop in and whitewash history to wash away the blood on their hands and their culpability. I saw a video this morning of Dick Gregory recounting a meeting he had with Billy Kyles. Kyles was the last person who met with Dr. Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis. I will let you watch this most astounding video below, I used the same clip in the latest Ghion Cast where I discussed the playbook of “kill first and own narratives next” in a broader context. As Dick Gregory says, “God baffles the mind to make us speak truth.” It is said that a lie travels the world before truth can put on its pants; but in the end, truth catches up because truth endures where lies eventually get exhausted. #TruthPrevails

“The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.”—Martin Luther King, Jr.

Check out one of my favorite speeches of all time and really listen closely to the words of Robert F. Kennedy, a speech he gave after the assassination of Martin Luther King. It is no accident that Robert Kennedy too was silenced. Those who speak of togetherness are shredded by the system that thrives of divisiveness.

Record Number of Women Run for U.S. House Seats

CHERRY HILL, N.J.—The number of women running for seats in the U.S. House of Representatives set a record Thursday, the vast majority of them Democrats motivated by angst over President Donald Trump and policies of the Republican-controlled Congress.

Their ranks will continue to grow in the weeks ahead, with filing deadlines still to come in more than half the states.

In many places, women are running for congressional seats that have never had a female representative.

“It’s about time,” said Kara Eastman of Nebraska, one of two Democrats vying to challenge a Republican incumbent in a district centered in Omaha.

A surge of women into this year’s midterm elections had been expected since the Women’s March demonstrations nationwide just after Trump’s inauguration in January 2017. Numbers analyzed by The Associated Press show that momentum is continuing.

After Virginia released its candidate list Thursday, a total of 309 women from the two major parties have filed candidacy papers to run for the House. That tops the previous record of 298 in 2012.

The AP analyzed data going back to 1992 from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University and did its own review of candidate information released by the states.

While just over half the nation’s population is female, four out of every five members of the U.S. House are men. The women’s candidacies won’t necessarily change that. They still have to survive party primaries and win the general election, often against an incumbent with name recognition and a large reservoir of campaign cash.

Even with the record numbers, women are still outnumbered by male candidates. But experts say the sheer number of women running combined with so many House seats open due to retirements or resignations provides one of the best opportunities for women to make real gains in terms of representation and a change in priorities.

Many of the female candidates have focused their campaign messages on health care, education, early childhood development, family leave and workplace equality.

Eastman said she was motivated by Republican attempts to cut health coverage for low-income people and rollbacks of environmental protections.

She decided to run after her mother, who has since died, was diagnosed with cancer for the fifth time and saw her prescription drug prices soar even though she was covered by Medicare.

“It’s a great thing for me to show my 16-year-old daughter,” Eastman, who runs a children’s health care nonprofit, said of her candidacy.

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Linke is an Associated Press visual journalist who reported from Washington, D.C. Associated Press writer Christina A. Cassidy in Atlanta contributed to this report.

U.S. Trade Gap Rises for the 6th Straight Month, to 9½-Year High

WASHINGTON—The U.S. trade deficit rose for the sixth straight month in February, reaching the highest level since October 2008 and defying President Donald Trump’s efforts to rebalance America’s lopsided trade with the rest of the world.

The Commerce Department said Thursday that the trade gap — the difference between what America sells and what it buys in foreign markets — widened to $57.6 billion in February from $56.7 billion in January. Exports of goods and services hit a record $204.4 billion; imports set a record $262 billion.

The news comes amid a U.S. trade dispute with China that has rattled global financial markets and raised fears among U.S. farmers and businesses that depend on access to the Chinese market. The trade deficit in goods with China narrowed in February to $29.3 billion from $36 billion in January.

The United States ran a $77 billion deficit in the trade of goods in February, the highest level since July 2008. That was partially offset by a $19.4 billion surplus in services such as education and banking, lowest since December 2012. The services surplus was dragged down $1 billion in payments for broadcast rights for the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, which count as a services import.

Exports of cars and auto parts posted big increases in February as did imports of pharmaceuticals, crude oil and civilian aircraft.

Trump campaigned on a pledge to take aggressive action to reduce America’s massive trade deficits. In March, he slapped tariffs on imported steel and aluminum but exempted most major countries except China and Japan. China counterpunched this week with tariffs on $3 billion in U.S. products.

On Tuesday, the U.S. proposed slapping tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese imports, and Beijing responded within hours with plans to tax $50 billion in American products, including soybeans and small aircraft. The two countries have signaled that they will seek to settle their differences before the tariffs take effect.

The president views trade deficits as a sign of economic weakness and as the result of bad trade agreements and unfair practices by America’s trading partners. Most economists say they are caused by bigger economic forces, mainly the fact that the United States consistently spends more than it produces.

The trade gap has continued to rise since Trump entered the White House partly because the U.S. economy is strong and American consumers have an appetite for imported products and the confidence and financial wherewithal to buy them.

Rights Group Calls Gaza Killings Unlawful, Calculated

Jerusalem—Senior Israeli officials who unlawfully called for use of live ammunition against Palestinian demonstrations who posed no imminent threat to life bear responsibility for the killings of 14 demonstrators in Gaza and the injuring of hundreds on March 30, 2018, Human Rights Watch says.

Both before and after the confrontations, senior officials publicly said that soldiers stationed along the barrier that separates Gaza and Israel had orders to target “instigators” and those who approach the border. However, the Israeli government presented no evidence that rock-throwing and other violence by some demonstrators seriously threatened Israeli soldiers across the border fence. The high number of deaths and injuries was the foreseeable consequence of granting soldiers leeway to use lethal force outside of life-threatening situations in violation of international norms, coupled with the longstanding culture of impunity within the Israeli army for serious abuses.

“Israeli soldiers were not merely using excessive force, but were apparently acting on orders that all but ensured a bloody military response to the Palestinian demonstrations,” said Eric Goldstein, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The result was foreseeable deaths and injuries of demonstrators on the other side of a border who posed no imminent threat to life.”

The killings highlight the importance of the International Criminal Court prosecutor opening a formal investigation into serious international crimes in Palestine, Human Rights Watch said.

Israel and Egypt maintain a heavily secured border around the 40-kilometer-long, 11-kilometer-wide Gaza Strip. Since Israel withdrew its permanent ground troop presence and civilian settlements from the Gaza Strip in 2005, it has maintained a “no-go zone” on the border. Nearly 2 million Palestinians, including 1.3 million refugees, live in Gaza. The vast majority are unable to leave, including to the West Bank, due to sweeping Israeli and Egyptian restrictions on movement. Israel’s closure policy also heavily restricts the flow of goods into and out of Gaza.

In the days ahead of planned demonstrations to mark Land Day, held annually on March 30 to highlight the dispossession of Palestinians over the years, Israeli officials repeatedly proclaimed their intent to fire on “instigators” and those approaching the border fence. In interviews given on March 28, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, announced that he would deploy 100 snipers to the Gaza border area to block “mass infiltration” or damage to the border fence, saying that, “The orders are to use a lot of force.” On March 29, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Arabic spokesman posted a video of a man shot in the leg, stating, “This is the least that anyone who tries to cross the security fence between Gaza and Israel will face.” On the morning of March 30, Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman tweeted in Arabic that, “Anyone who approaches the border puts his life in jeopardy.”

Organizers of this year’s Land Day demonstrations said they would also affirm Palestinians’ internationally recognized right of return. Most of the thousands who participated in Gaza stayed in tent encampments, due to remain in place until May 15, the 70th anniversary of the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”), the displacement of Palestinians that accompanied the founding of the Israeli state. The tent villages were pitched at various points about 500 meters inside the border.

While most of the people in the tent villages did not approach the border, groups of mostly young men did so, some throwing stones, and, according to the IDF, “Molotov cocktails” (improvised gasoline bombs). Israeli forces directed fire at these men, killing 14 and injuring 1,415—758 of them with live ammunition—according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Rubber bullets and teargas injured others. The Israeli army disputes these figures, contending that the number of Palestinians injured by live ammunition was likely in the dozens.

Gaza’s Health Ministry noted it had received the bodies of two other men killed in unknown circumstances near Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza. Israeli authorities also announced they are holding the bodies of two additional men killed on March 30, who it claims were armed and aiming to carry out a “terrorist operation in Israel.”

Human Rights Watch spoke to doctors who treated patients at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City who said they had received 294 injured demonstrators on March 30, most with injuries to the lower limbs from live ammunition, and five who died, all with head and chest injuries.

As events unfolded in the afternoon, both the IDF spokesperson and Israel’s coordinator of government activities in the territories, Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, tweeted that the army was firing on “main instigators.” The spokesperson added that, “Whenever there has been an attempt to damage the fence, we fired with precision, intensity and determination, exercising judgment.” Gen. Ronen Manelis, the chief army spokesman, told the New York Times that the operation aimed “not to allow the sabotage of military infrastructure and not to allow any mass crossing of the fence.”

While some protesters near the border fence burned tires and threw rocks, Human Rights Watch could find no evidence of any protester using firearms or any IDF claim of threatened firearm use at the demonstrations. The IDF spokesperson, in a tweet posted in the early morning of March 31, “Everything you need to know about the riots in Gaza today,” accused demonstrators of “hurling burning tires, throwing Molotov cocktails, and attempting to harm or destroy Israel’s security infrastructure.” It made no mention of Palestinians using firearms at the protests.

Footage of demonstrations published by the army includes no evidence of firearms. The army published a video purporting to show two men firing at Israeli troops on March 30, but noted that this took place in northern Gaza Strip, not on the eastern border where the Land Day demonstrations took place. No demonstrators can be seen in the video. To Human Rights Watch’s knowledge, the army did not report any injuries to soldiers.

In the absence of armed hostilities, in which international humanitarian law applies, the use of force in Gaza is governed by international human rights law. While security forces may use force under applicable international law to prevent unauthorized crossing of borders, Israel has presented no information that any threat at the border required a response in which the use of military force was necessary, such as an attack by armed combatants. The United Nations Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials hold that security forces shall “apply non-violent means before resorting to the use of force and firearms,” and that “whenever the lawful use of force and firearms is unavoidable, law enforcement officials shall: (a) Exercise restraint in such use and act in proportion to the seriousness of the offence and the legitimate objective to be achieved; (b) Minimize damage and injury, and respect and preserve human life.” Furthermore, “intentional lethal use of firearms may only be made when strictly unavoidable in order to protect life.”

The Israeli government has not shown that the demonstrators throwing rocks or Molotov cocktails posed a grave threat to the well-protected soldiers deployed on the other side of the border fence, nor has Israel claimed that any Palestinian crossed the border on March 30.

Human Rights Watch reviewed footage it believes authentic based on an interview with the videographer that appears to show a demonstrator shot in the leg while praying and another video showing a man shot while throwing a rock. Other videos reviewed appear to show demonstrators shot while slowly walking toward the border empty-handed or holding only a Palestinian flag or retreating from the border. Interviews with six witnesses, including three journalists, indicated that soldiers shot at men who were in the area between the encampments and the fence but who posed no grave threat to anyone across the fence.

Entering a zone declared off limits should not be a crime considered punishable by death, Human Rights Watch said.

The Israeli army also has alleged that those killed included “10 known terrorists with track records of terror activity.” By making such claims, the military appears to be trying to justify otherwise unlawful killings in a law enforcement situation based on alleged past activity.

In 2017, Human Rights Watch documented that some senior Israeli officials encouraged soldiers and police to kill Palestinians in the West Bank they suspect of attacking Israelis even when they are no longer a threat.

On April 1, Lieberman said there will be no official inquiry into the March 30 killings and that the Israeli government will not cooperate with any international investigation. Both the UN Secretary General and the European Union have called for “independent and transparent investigation.” Both he and Netanyahu have commended the soldiers’ handling of the protests.

But under the UN Basic Principles, “[i]n cases of death and serious injury or other grave consequences, a detailed report shall be sent promptly to the competent authorities responsible for administrative review and judicial control.” Israeli authorities have for decades failed to credibly investigate potentially unlawful killings by security forces and to hold violators to account for wrongdoing.

An army source told Haaretz on April 2 that, “We will continue to act against the demonstrators in Gaza as we acted last Friday.” With more demonstrations planned in coming weeks, the Israeli government should recognize that, even in the absence of serious domestic oversight, officials who order unlawful lethal force may become subject to prosecution abroad as a matter of universal jurisdiction or in international judicial forums.

“Praising the army’s handling of the March 30 events and saying there shall be no inquiry into how Israeli soldiers gunned down 14 protesters across a fence says much about how cheaply Israeli authorities view the lives of Palestinians in Gaza,” Goldstein said.

Does Trump Want to Fire Robert Mueller or Discredit Him?

This article was first published on Truthout on March 25.

Over the past week, nearly a year after he tried to have Robert Mueller fired, Donald Trump went on a tweeting rampage against the special counsel. Trump’s escalating Twitter attacks may be a harbinger of Mueller’s impending dismissal — or the president could be trying to preemptively discredit and delegitimize Mueller’s eventual findings against him.

Mueller was appointed special counsel in May 2017. The following month, Trump ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller. McGahn refused and threatened to resign. Trump backed down but has been champing at the bit to end Mueller’s investigation, apparently restrained by his lawyers’ promises that the probe is coming to an end. In addition, GOP heavyweights like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) warned that firing Mueller would spell “the beginning of the end of [Trump’s] presidency.”

But Mueller’s investigation shows no signs of abating. He continues to secure grand jury indictments, as well as plea bargains that make those pleading guilty into cooperating witnesses. And now he has subpoenaed financial records of the Trump Organization.

Mueller’s Charge

Although the Department of Justice regulation empowers the Attorney General to appoint a special counsel, that task fell to Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein last year, since Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation.

Rosenstein appointed Mueller to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump” as well as “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.”

The Justice Department regulation allows for discipline or removal of the special counsel only in the event of “misconduct, dereliction of duty, incapacity, conflict of interest, or for other good cause, including violation of Departmental policies.”

Rosenstein recently told USA Today that he sees no justification for terminating Mueller as special counsel, stating, “The special counsel is not an unguided missile.”

Trump cannot personally fire Mueller. He could order Rosenstein to do it, and if Rosenstein refuses, Trump could fire Rosenstein or force his resignation. Since Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand is about to retire, the next person in line who could fire Mueller would be Solicitor General Noel Francisco, a right-winger with ties to the conservative Federalist Society. Francisco may be amenable to giving Mueller the axe.

Mueller Team Subpoenas Trump Organization, Meets With Trump Lawyers

Last week, the special counsel issued subpoenas to the Trump Organization for financial documents, some of which relate to Russia. NBC News reported that the subpoena seeks emails, work papers, text messages, telephone logs “and other documents going back to Nov. 1, 2015, 4½ months after Trump launched his campaign.” According to The New York Times, “The order is the first known instance of the special counsel demanding records directly related to President Trump’s businesses, bringing the investigation closer to the president.”

Last July, Trump told the Times that Mueller would cross a “red line” if he investigated any Trump business unrelated to Russia.

A few days after the subpoenas were served, Trump’s lawyers met with Mueller’s team “and received more details about how the special counsel is approaching the investigation, including the scope of his interest in the Trump Organization,” the Times reported.

Mueller’s investigation is apparently pursuing three issues, according to Timothy L. O’Brien at Bloomberg:

First, it is seeking information as to whether Trump or his campaign worked with Russia to help Trump win the election. Second, it is looking into whether Trump or his advisers engaged in obstruction of justice to end the investigation. And third, it is investigating a possible quid pro quo that Trump and family members, particularly son-in-law Jared Kushner, may have sought in return for political favors, such as lifting sanctions on Russia or altering US policy on the Ukraine.

Trump’s Tweet Storm Targets Mueller

After the meeting between the special counsel’s team and his lawyers, Trump let loose with his tweet storm, calling out Mueller by name for the first time on Twitter since the special counsel was appointed. According to CNN, the meeting “unleashed a new level of Trump’s public hostility toward Mueller, even while some of the President’s advisers show a willingness to negotiate Trump’s testimony.”

On March 17, Trump tweeted, “The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime.”

On March 18, Trump tweeted, “Why does the Mueller team have 13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans? Another Dem recently added . . . does anyone think this is fair? And yet, there is NO COLLUSION!” Trump apparently forgot that Mueller, the head of the team, is a long-time Republican.

Trump is evidently aware that conflict of interest is a ground for firing a special counsel. Having laid the foundation for that alleged conflict with his tweet about “hardened Democrats,” Trump followed up the next day with a tweet: “A total witch hunt with massive conflicts of interest!”

On March 21, Trump invoked the opinion of Fox News contributor and emeritus Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who opposed the appointment of Mueller in the first place. Trump paraphrased Dershowitz’s statements, tweeting, “I think President Trump was right when he said there never should have been a Special Council (sic) appointed because there was no probable cause for believing that there was any crime, collusion or otherwise, or obstruction of justice.”

Dershowitz apparently failed to read the regulation, which does not require probable cause of criminal activity at the time a special counsel is appointed. After appointment, the counsel’s investigation may or may not uncover evidence amounting to probable cause, which is the standard for the filing of criminal charges.

Trump’s lawyers have sent conflicting signals about the fate of the Mueller investigation. On March 16, attorney John Dowd wrote in an email to the Daily Beast, “I pray that Acting Attorney General Rosenstein will . . . bring an end to alleged Russian Collusion investigation.” Dowd first said he was speaking on behalf of the president, but later backtracked and said he was speaking for himself. He resigned a few days later, saying the president wasn’t following his advice.

Ty Cobb, another Trump lawyer, tried to defuse the growing fear that Mueller’s days are numbered, stating on March 18, “The White House yet again confirms that the president is not considering or discussing the firing of the special counsel, Robert Mueller.”

But Trump just hired attorney Joseph diGenova, who has publicly accused the FBI and Justice Department of “trying to frame” the president, a claim that likely endears him to Trump.

Democrats fear that Trump might set the wheels in motion to fire Mueller during the forthcoming two-week congressional spring break.

Some Republicans Support Mueller but Won’t Codify It With Legislation

Eight months ago, legislators introduced two bipartisan bills to subject a president’s order to fire a special counsel to judicial review. But Republican lawmakers are not promoting the legislation, which is now stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Although some Republicans have questioned the constitutionality of the legislation, those concerns are without merit, and are more likely motivated by political considerations.

GOP lawmakers know that any bill they pass to protect Mueller would require Trump’s signature and they would have to override his veto. Republicans are more likely “making a counterintuitive, all-in bet that Donald Trump will save their 51-49 majority” in the Senate, according to Politico. They expect Trump to actively campaign for Republican incumbents as well as challengers. “If they’re going to run with him, how are they also going to stand up to him when he precipitates a constitutional crisis? The answer is that they’re not,” Michael Tomasky wrote in the Daily Beast.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Mueller “ought to be allowed to finish his job,” adding, “I think he was an excellent appointment.” McConnell told reporters, “I think he will go wherever the facts lead him and I think he will have great credibility with the American people when he reaches the conclusion of his investigation. So, I have a lot of confidence in him.” The senator called Mueller “a thoroughly credible individual.”

But when pressed about legislation to protect Mueller, McConnell demurred, saying, “I don’t think that’s necessary. I don’t think Bob Mueller is going anywhere. I think there is widespread feeling, and the president’s lawyers obviously agree, that he ought to be allowed to finish the job.”

Other GOP senators expressed confidence in Mueller. Sen. Orrin Hatch (Utah) said he told the White House to allow Mueller “to continue his investigation unimpeded,” adding, “I know Mueller well and believe him to be a straight shooter, and I continue to believe that giving Mueller the time and support necessary to get to the bottom of things is in the best interest of all parties involved.” But Hatch didn’t think legislation to protect Mueller was necessary at this point, saying, “I do not believe the president would take such a foolish action.”

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (Texas) said he doubted Trump would terminate Mueller’s appointment because “the consequences would be so overwhelming.”

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Arizona) stated on CNN’s “State of the Union” that some of his GOP colleagues told him they would consider the firing of Mueller to be a “massive red line that can’t be crossed.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) told reporters, “I received assurances that [Mueller’s] firing is not even under consideration,” adding, “The special counsel should be free to follow through his investigation to its completion without interference, absolutely. I am confident he will be able to do that.”

A special counsel cannot be removed absent good cause under the Justice Department regulation. But without protective legislation, there could be no review of a meritless decision by Trump to dismiss Mueller.

Can Mueller Indict Trump?

What consequences, if any, could Trump face if the special counsel finds evidence of criminal activity by the president?

Mueller could deliver his findings to the House of Representatives for consideration of impeachment. But that body, with its Republican majority, will not likely entertain any discussion of impeachment, particularly because Trump is dutifully fulfilling their agenda of tax cuts for the rich and the appointment of a right-wing Supreme Court justice and lower federal court judges.

Whether or not a sitting president can be criminally indicted is a matter of controversy.

A memo from independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation of Clinton says a president can be indicted for criminal activity: “It is proper, constitutional, and legal for a federal grand jury to indict a sitting president for serious criminal acts that are not part of, and are contrary to, the president’s official duties. In this country, no one, even President Clinton, is above the law.”

Moreover, diGenova once argued in a Wall Street Journal column that a president could be constitutionally indicted. “It would teach the valuable civics lesson that no one is above the law,” diGenova wrote during the Clinton investigation.

Jonathan Turley, writing in The Washington Post, examined the arguments for and against indicting a sitting president and concluded he could be indicted. It is unclear whether a president can pardon himself, but Turley thinks Trump would be impeached if he were to pardon himself.

A Preemptive Strike by Trump?

Trump is notorious for relying on his own instincts rather than the advice of counsel, such as whether to congratulate Russian President Vladimir Putin on his election victory. But Trump is apparently aware of the risks entailed by engineering Mueller’s departure.

As the special counsel zeroes in on him, Trump may instead be mounting a preemptive strike against Mueller’s findings, should they incriminate him. Recall that Trump didn’t expect to be elected president, so he waged a campaign to discredit the election results in advance, repeatedly claiming the election was “rigged.”

The bottom line is that we may never see Mueller’s findings unless he persuades a grand jury to return an indictment against Trump.

If Mueller’s conclusions do become public, Trump is likely counting on his preemptive campaign of delegitimization in order to escape criminal accountability.

Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission.

Planned Parenthood Chief: Ivanka and Jared Offered ‘Bribe’ to Stop Abortions

In her new memoir, “Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead,” Planned Parenthood chief Cecile Richards discusses her attempts to safeguard female reproductive health during the presidential transition in early 2017. In one passage, she reveals that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner offered her what felt like a “bribe” in exchange for federal funding.

Richards wrote that she was hesitant to take the meeting in January 2017 (before the inauguration) with Trump and Kushner, but had been hopeful that Planned Parenthood might find new allies in the Trump administration.

“Even if there was only a sliver of a chance of changing anyone’s mind, I owed it to Planned Parenthood patients to at least take the meeting,” Richards explains. Her husband, Kirk Adams, joined the meeting because Richards felt she “needed a witness.”

In a statement Planned Parenthood provided to Time, the purpose of the meeting “was to make sure that Ivanka Trump fully understood the important role Planned Parenthood plays in providing health care to millions of people and why it would be a disastrous idea to block people from accessing care at Planned Parenthood.”

People further reports:

After Richards explained this, she writes that Kushner told her Planned Parenthood “had made a big mistake by becoming ‘political.’ ”

“The main issue, he explained, was abortion,” Richards writes. “If Planned Parenthood wanted to keep our federal funding, we would have to stop providing abortions. He described his ideal outcome: a national headline reading ‘Planned Parenthood Discontinues Abortion Services.’ ”

According to Make Trouble, Kushner said that if Richards agreed to the plan then funding could increase, but he urged them to “move fast.”

Richards says she “shut down the conversation” and told the pair there was “no way” their idea was viable. “It was surreal, essentially being asked to barter away women’s rights for more money,” she reflects in the book. She reportedly told them: “Our mission is to care for women who need us, and that means caring for all of their reproductive needs—including safe and legal abortion.”

Ivanka Trump’s stance on abortion has been historically vague, and she has largely remained silent when her father’s administration has made moves to restrict abortion access.

“I don’t express my views on policy, with one exception as it relates to child care and advocating for women,” she said at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit in October 2016. However, even before Donald Trump took office, Ivanka refused to disclose her own views on abortion, saying they were not pertinent.

Trump Working With Governors to Send Troops to Guard Border

WASHINGTON — President Trump and border-state governors are working to “immediately” deploy the National Guard to the U.S.-Mexico border to fight illegal immigration, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Wednesday.

“The threat is real,” Nielsen said, adding that Trump was signing a proclamation to put the deployment into effect. “It’s time to act.”

The announcement came hours after Trump pledged “strong action today” on immigration and a day after he said he wanted to use the military to secure the southern border until his long-promised border wall is erected.

Nielsen said she’s been in touch with governors on the southwest border states and has been working with them to develop agreements that will oversee where and how many Guardsmen will be deployed. She suggested some troops could begin arriving as soon as Wednesday night, though other administration officials cautioned that details on troop levels, locations and timing were still being worked out.

“We do hope that the deployment begins immediately,” she said.

Trump has been frustrated by slow action on building his “big, beautiful wall” along the Mexican border — the signature promise of his campaign — as well as a recent uptick in illegal border crossings that had plunged during the early months of his presidency. He has also been fixated on the issue of border security since he grudgingly signed a spending bill last month that includes far less money for the wall than he’d hoped for.

Federal law prohibits the use of active-duty service members for law enforcement inside the U.S., unless specifically authorized by Congress. But over the past 12 years, presidents have twice sent National Guard troops to the border to bolster security and assist with surveillance and other support.

Nielsen said the effort would be similar to a 2006 operation in which President George W. Bush deployed troops to help U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel with non-law enforcement duties while additional border agents were hired and trained. President Barack Obama also sent about 1,200 troops in 2010 to beef up efforts against drug smuggling and illegal immigration.

Nielsen said her department had developed a list of locations where it would like assistance and was discussing with the governors how to facilitate the plans. She declined to say how many personnel would be needed or how much the operation would cost, but she insisted, “It will be as many as is needed to fill the gaps that we have today.”

One congressional aide said that lawmakers anticipate 300 to 1,200 troops will be deployed and that the cost of the deployment was expected to be at least $60 million to $120 million a year. The Pentagon can likely reprogram funds in the short term but would probably need authorization from Congress beyond a few months, said the aide, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Republican governors of Texas and Arizona applauded the move, while New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, also a Republican, didn’t immediately comment on it. Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown of California, who has been sparring with Trump over immigration policies, is likely to oppose it.

Trump first revealed Tuesday that he’d been discussing the idea of using the military at the border with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.

“We’re going to be doing things militarily. Until we can have a wall and proper security, we’re going to be guarding our border with the military,” Trump said, calling the move a “big step.”

He spent the first months of his presidency bragging about a dramatic drop in illegal border crossings, which some DHS officials had even dubbed the “Trump effect.” Indeed, arrests at the border last April were at the lowest level since the Homeland Security Department was created in 2003, and the 2017 fiscal year saw a 45-year low for Border Patrol arrests.

But the numbers have been slowly ticking up since last April and are now on par with many months of the Obama administration. Statistics show 36,695 arrests of people trying to cross the southwest border in February 2018, up from 23,555 in the same month of the previous year.

Trump’s new focus on hard-line immigration policies appears aimed, at least in part, in drawing a political contrast with Democrats heading into the midterm elections. He has also been under growing pressure from conservative backers who have accused him of betraying his base for not delivering on the wall, and he was set off by images played on his favorite network, Fox News, of a “caravan” of migrants making their way through Mexico.

On Capitol Hill, many Republicans embraced the move.

House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, called the plan “a positive step toward providing the safety this nation has long demanded.” And Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, called it “a common-sense way to temporarily assist law enforcement along the border.”

But Astrid Dominguez, director of the ACLU Border Rights Center, slammed it as “another impulsive reaction to not getting his way on his border wall” and “a dangerous move, contrary to the fundamental norms of a civil society.”

In Texas, which already has about 100 National Guard members stationed on the border, Gov. Greg Abbott, praised the president’s decision.

“Today’s action by the Trump Administration reinforces Texas’ longstanding commitment to secure our southern border and uphold the Rule of Law, and I welcome the support,” he said.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey tweeted that his state “welcomes the deployment of National Guard to the border. Washington has ignored this issue for too long and help is needed.”

___

Associated Press writers Lolita C. Baldor, Matthew Daly and Robert Burns in Washington and Nomaan Merchant in Houston contributed to this report.

Facebook Scandal Affects More Users Than Thought: Up to 87M

NEW YORK — Facebook revealed Wednesday that tens of millions more people might have been exposed in the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal than previously thought and said it will restrict the user data that outsiders can access.

Those developments came as congressional officials said CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify next week, while Facebook unveiled a new privacy policy that aims to explain the data it gathers on users more clearly — but doesn’t actually change what it collects and shares.

In a call with reporters Wednesday, Zuckerberg admitted he made a “huge mistake” in failing to take a broad enough view of what Facebook’s responsibility is in the world. He said it isn’t enough for Facebook to believe app developers when they say they follow the rules. He says Facebook has to ensure they do.

Facebook is facing its worst privacy scandal in years following allegations that Cambridge Analytica, a Trump-affiliated data mining firm, used ill-gotten data from millions of users through an app to try to influence elections. Facebook said Wednesday that as many as 87 million people might have had their data accessed — an increase from the 50 million disclosed in published reports.

This Monday, all Facebook users will receive a notice on their Facebook feeds with a link to see what apps they use and what information they have shared with those apps. They’ll have a chance to delete apps they no longer want. Users who might have had their data shared with Cambridge Analytica will be told of that. Facebook says most of the affected users are in the U.S.

With outsiders’ access to data under scrutiny, Facebook outlined several changes to further tighten its policies.

Facebook is restricting access that apps can get about users’ events, as well as information about groups such as member lists and content.

In addition, the company is also removing the option to search for users by entering a phone number or an email address. While this helped individuals find friends, Facebook says businesses that had phone or email information on customers were able to collect profile information this way. Facebook says it believes most of its 2.2 billion users had their public profile information scraped by businesses or various malicious actors through this technique at some point. Posts and other content set to be visible only to friends weren’t collected.

This comes on top of changes announced a few weeks ago. For example, Facebook has said it will remove developers’ access to people’s data if the person has not used the app in three months.

Earlier Wednesday, Facebook unveiled a new privacy policy that seeks to clarify its data collection and use.

Although Facebook says the policy changes aren’t prompted by recent events or tighter privacy rules coming from the EU, it’s an opportune time. It comes as Zuckerberg is set to appear April 11 before a House committee — his first testimony before Congress. Separately, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and various authorities in Europe are investigating.

As Facebook evolved from a closed, Harvard-only network with no ads to a giant corporation with $40 billion in advertising revenue and huge subsidiaries like Instagram and WhatsApp, its privacy policy has also shifted — over and over.

Almost always, critics say, the changes meant a move away from protecting user privacy toward pushing openness and more sharing. On the other hand, regulatory and user pressure has sometimes led Facebook to pull back on its data collection and use and to explain things in plainer language — in contrast to dense legalese from many other internet companies.

The policy changes come a week after Facebook gave its privacy settings a makeover. The company tried to make it easier to navigate its complex and often confusing privacy and security settings, though the makeover didn’t change what Facebook collects and shares either.

Facebook’s new privacy policy has a new section explaining that it collects people’s contact information if they choose to “upload, sync or import” this to the service. This may include users’ address books on their phones, as well as their call logs and text histories. The new policy says Facebook may use this data to help “you and others find people you may know.”

The previous policy did not mention call logs or text histories. Several users were surprised to learn recently that Facebook had been collecting information about whom they texted or called and for how long, though not the actual contents of text messages. It seemed to have been done without explicit consent, though Facebook says it collected such data only from Android users who specifically allowed it to do so — for instance, by agreeing to permissions when installing Facebook.

Facebook also clarified that local laws could affect what it does with “sensitive” data on people, such as information about a user’s race or ethnicity, health, political views or even trade union membership. The new policy says local laws could give some users “special protections,” implying those protections won’t be extended to those who live in the U.S. and other countries with looser privacy laws. Facebook has always had regional differences in policies, and the new document makes that clearer.

The new policy also makes it clear that WhatsApp and Instagram are part of Facebook and that the companies share information about users. WhatsApp will still have a separate policy as well, while Facebook and Instagram share one.

Russia Madness on the Eve of Destruction: Hegemony Trumps Survival

Noam Chomsky’s 2016 book “Who Rules the World?” contains a passage in which the great left thinker asks readers to “imagine you’re a historian a hundred years from now—assuming there are any historians a hundred years from now, which is not obvious—and you’re looking back on what’s happening today.” This reflection appears in a chapter titled “The Eve of Destruction.”

It’s a bracing thought. Given the current state and rate of environmental destruction, the continuing advance in the destructive power of nuclear weapons systems, and the likelihood of pandemics in a warmer and more globalized world, there are good reasons to wonder if a human civilization with historians will exist a century from today. We may well be standing near the “end of history,” and not the glorious bourgeois-democratic one that Francis Fukuyama imagined with the end of the Cold War.

Speaking of cold wars, United States neoconservatives and liberals have in the last three decades teamed up to create a “new” one with still heavily nuclear-weaponized Russia. The risk of a nuclear war catastrophe is greater today than it was during the Cold War, when humanity came close to disaster on numerous occasions. This reflects the ongoing development of nuclear weapons technologies and a series of U.S. and U.S.-allied Western actions that have provoked Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European empire:

● President Bill Clinton’s decision to annul a 1990 agreement with Moscow not to push the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) further east after the reunification of Germany and not to recruit Eastern European states that had been part of the Soviet-ruled Warsaw Pact.

● NATO’s decision to renege on its 1997 pledge not to install “permanent” and “significant” military forces in former Soviet bloc nations.

● NATO’s decision two years ago to place four battalions on and near the Russian border.

● The 1999 U.S.-NATO military intervention in the Yugoslav civil war, leading to the dismemberment of Serbia and the building of a giant U.S. military base in the newly NATO-U.S.-created state of Kosovo. This remarkable development has hardly stopped Washington from shaming Russia for deploying its military to “forcibly redraw borders in Europe” by annexing Crimea.

● President George W. Bush’s unilateral withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

● President Barack Obama’s decision to deploy anti-missile systems (supposedly aimed at Iran’s nonexistent nuclear weapons and actually meant to intercept Russian missiles) in Romania and Poland.

● Obama’s decision to invest more than $1 trillion in an upgrade of the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal, which was already stocked to blow up the world 50 times over. The upgrade involves “strategic” bombs with smaller yields, something that dangerously blurs the lines between conventional and nuclear weapons. It has certainly helped spark a new nuclear arms race with Russia and, perhaps, China.

● U.S. provocation and endorsement of a 2014 right-wing coup against the pro-Russian government in Ukraine—on Russia’s western border—a development that predictably created war in eastern Ukraine and a crisis that has led to dozens of dangerous incidents between NATO and Russian forces.

● Washington’s self-righteous denunciation and slandering of Russia’s “very reasonable” annexation of Crimea (in the words of political writer Diana Johnstone), which was overwhelmingly supported by Crimeans as a natural response to the United States’ installation of a right-wing, pro-NATO government in Kiev.

Perilous as the nuclear situation may be, the environmental danger is arguably greater. This is thanks to the shrinking time window for averting a climate catastrophe that is unfolding before our very eyes. Nuclear weapons don’t kill off the human species just by existing. If we continue to miraculously escape launch (and even a first strike could start nuclear winter on its own) for a century, we can thank our lucky stars and proceed to dismantle nuclear weapons in 2118. There’ll be no such luck available to us if we avoid action to stop the carbon-gassing of life on earth. We have 20 to 30 years (to be generous) to get off fossil fuels and curb mass consumption or it’s curtains. We are currently on pace for 500 atmospheric carbon parts per million—a level of warming likely to melt much of the world’s life-supporting Antarctic ice sheet—within 50 years, if not sooner.

Every new year of increased carbon emissions in an ever-warmer and more climatologically volatile world speeds us toward fatal feedback loops (perhaps already underway), bringing the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock closer to midnight. The clock is currently at two minutes to doom, thanks to what leading scientists call “the failure of world leaders to … reduce the existential threat of nuclear war and unchecked climate change.”

As Andrew Glikson, the Australian earth and paleoclimate scientist, explained eight years ago: “Humans cannot argue with the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere. What is needed are urgent measures including: deep cuts in carbon emissions; parallel fast-track transformation to non-polluting energy utilities—solar, solar-thermal, wind, tide, geothermal, hot rocks; global reforestation and re-vegetation campaigns, including application of biochar. The alternative does not bear contemplation.”

“The alternative” is underway. There’s no mystery about the exterminist consequences of an open-ended increase in atmospheric carbon. The lethal results are richly evident in the planet’s geological record.

Can we survive and even maintain a decent or better existence into another and future centuries? Perhaps. But surviving will require massive, and combined, dialectically inseparable transformations in our relationships with each other and with nature, of which we are of course part. It will require a radical restructuring and revolutionary makeover. The British Marxist economist Michael Roberts is likely right to argue that we cannot undertake the collective planning and coordinated action required to save the commons under the bourgeois system of socioeconomic management and politics, with capital and profit at the chaotic and amoral commanding heights:

The potentially disastrous effects from higher temperature, rising sea levels, and extreme weather formations will be hugely damaging especially to the poorest and most vulnerable people on the planet. But industrialization and human activity need not produce these effects if human beings organized their activities in a planned way with due regard for the protection of natural resources and the wider impact on the environment and public health. That seems impossible under capitalism. … What is really needed … require[s] public control and ownership of the energy and transport industries and public investment in the environment for the public good. …

It is important to note that the climate crisis hits disadvantaged populations first—and the rich and powerful last. One problem we face is that class rule (and capitalism is, among other things, a system of class rule) tends to delay a civilization’s capacity to perceive threats to its continued existence until the full consequences of the civilization’s deadly practices are felt by those who have been protected by class privilege from environmental harm. By the time the ruling class gets it, things have gone too far. This in one of the timeworn paths to societal ruin discussed in a paper published four years ago by mathematician Safa Motesharrei, atmospheric scientist Eugenia Kalnay and political scientist Jorge Rivas in the journal Ecological Economics. Reviewing past societal collapses, they reflected on a potential current global scenario in which:

[T]he Elites—due to their wealth—do not suffer the detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners. This buffer of wealth allows Elites to continue ‘business as usual’ despite the impending catastrophe. It … explain[s] how historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases). This buffer effect is further reinforced by the long, apparently sustainable trajectory prior to the beginning of the collapse. While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory ‘so far’ in support of doing nothing.

Is this not the current state of humanity today, with many millions of disproportionately poor and powerless people already suffering from climate disruption while the wealthy few continue to enjoy lives of unimaginable, environmentally shielded opulence atop a recklessly fossil-fueled planet so vastly unequal that the world’s eight richest people possess as much wealth between them as the bottom half of the species?

It’s not an easy topic. The profits system seems fatally preemptive for the radical alterations in energy and resource that are required to avert catastrophe. But environmental beggars can’t be choosers, and there is a reason to feel reluctant to make (eco-) socialist transformation a prerequisite for saving chances for a decent future. Our time window for green transformation may be shorter than the period required for conceiving and birthing a socialist transformation.

This dilemma aside, one would think that an issue as significant as Homo sapiens sitting at the precipice of self-inflicted extinction would be front-page news. Think again. The climate crisis holds little interest for the U.S. commercial corporate media. The fact that the world stands at the eve of ecological self-destruction, with the climate-denying, fossil-fuel-loving Donald Trump White House in the lead, elicits barely a whisper in the reigning U.S. news media.

As far as “mainstream” U.S. media is concerned, the greatest danger posed by Trump has nothing to do with his insane commitment to the accelerated greenhouse gassing to death of life on earth. It’s all about the preposterous notion that he owes his presence in the White House to Russia’s supposed subversion of our unmentionably nonexistent “democracy.” It’s all about Russia, Russia, Russia and Trump, Trump, Trump or what I sometimes call “TWITR,” an acronym for “This Week in Trump and Russia.” It’s been an explicit programming decision—something I’ve written about at some length on at least three prior occasions (see this, this and this). It’s a remarkable choice—to put the biggest issue of our or any time on the back burner of the news.

Which brings me, curiously enough, to a second passage that jumped out at me in Chomsky’s “Who Rules the World?” On page 113 of that volume, near the end of an essay in which he reflects on how close John F. Kennedy helped bring the world to annihilation by engaging in a reckless game of thermonuclear chicken with the Soviet Union in October 1962, Chomsky reflects on a “basic principle” long shared by U.S. foreign policy makers and the reigning “elite” U.S. “intellectual and moral culture.” This principle, Chomsky writes, reflexively assumes “without question … that the U.S. effectively owns the world by right, and is by definition a force for good despite occasional errors and misunderstandings, one in which it is plainly entirely proper for the U.S. to deploy massive offensive force all over the world while it is an outrage for others (allies and clients apart) to make even the slightest gesture in that direction or even to think of deterring the threatened use of violence by the benign global hegemon.”

Consistent with Chomsky’s observation, a Pentagon study released last summer laments the emergence of a planet on which the U.S. no longer controls events. Titled “At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World,” the study warns that competing powers “seek a new distribution of power and authority commensurate with their emergence as legitimate rivals to U.S. dominance” in an increasingly multipolar world. China, Russia and smaller players like Iran and North Korea have dared to “engage,” the Pentagon study reports, “in a deliberate program to demonstrate the limits of U.S. authority, will, reach, influence and impact.” What chutzpah! This is a problem, the report argues, because the endangered, U.S.-managed world order was “favorable” to the interests of U.S. and allied U.S. states and U.S.-based transnational corporations.

Any serious efforts to redesign the international status quo so that it favors any other states or people is portrayed in the report as a threat to U.S. interests. To prevent any terrible drifts of the world system away from U.S. control, the report argues, the U.S. and its imperial partners (chiefly its European NATO partners) must maintain and expand “unimpeded access to the air, sea, space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum in order to underwrite their security and prosperity.”

The report recommends a significant expansion of U.S. military power. The U.S. must maintain “military advantage” over all other states and actors to “preserve maximum freedom of action” and thereby “allow U.S. decision-makers the opportunity to dictate or hold significant sway over outcomes in international disputes,” with the “implied promise of unacceptable consequences” for those who defy U.S. wishes.

“America First” is an understatement here. The underlying premise is that Uncle Sam owns the world and reserves the right to bomb the hell out of anyone who doesn’t agree with that. To quote President George H.W. Bush after the first Gulf War in 1991: “What we say goes.”

What is Russia’s great sin in the age of Vladimir Putin? America’s New Cold War complaints have ranged far and wide, running from claims that it is concerned about Russia’s oligarchic and repressive internal power structure, its rigged elections, its weak environmental protections, its violence against ethnic and religious minorities, its murderous military actions in Chechnya and the Middle East, its cyberwarfare against other states, to its supposed key role in undermining “American democracy” by supposedly tilting the 2016 U.S. presidential election to Trump over the leading anti-Russian, New Cold War hawk Hillary Clinton.

This is all quite dubious, to say the least. The openly plutocratic and itself corporate-oligarchic and environmentally ruinous United States possesses no great “democracy” to subvert in the first place. As Thomas Ferguson and his colleagues have recently shown in an important study at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Russian interference was of tiny significance compared to the impact of big American money in helping Trump defeat Hillary Clinton (and in helping Clinton defeat herself).

At the same time, the U.S. and many of its close allies commit the same crimes attributed to Russia by American New Cold Warriors. The world’s and history’s only global superpower, the United States, regularly interferes in other nation’s politics and kills people en masse abroad. It does both these things on a much bigger scale and much farther beyond its own borders than does Russia. Russia’s great sin for the American power and foreign policy elite is that it has dared to resist Washington’s supposedly God- and/or history-ordained right to run the world as its own possession even on Russia’s borders.

One of the many dirty little secrets of the Cold War was that anti-communism functioned as a pretext and cover for Washington’s Wall Street-fueled ambition to force open and run the entire world system in accord with its multinational corporate elite’s globalist-“Open-Door”-political-economic needs. From this imperial perspective, the real U.S. Cold War enemy was not so much “communism” as other peoples’ struggles for national, local and regional autonomy and independence. The enemy to the “open door” in Moscow remains after the statues of Marx, Lenin and Stalin have come down. It doesn’t matter that Russia is no longer socialist. Nationalist and regional pushback against Uncle “We Own the World” Sam has been more than sufficient to get Vladimir Putin designated as the next official Hitler and Russia targeted as a malevolent opponent by the U.S. elite political class and media.

The present moment is dire. We are witnessing the remarkable and dangerous continuation of a bizarre right-wing, prefascist U.S. presidency, subject to the weird whims and tweets of a malignant narcissist who doesn’t read memorandums or intelligence briefings. Unimpeded by a feckless “resistance” staged by a Russia-mad, inauthentic opposition party of elitist, anti-working-class “progressive” neoliberals (the dismal dollar Democrats), Trump poses grave environmental and nuclear risks to human survival. A consistent Trump belief is that climate change is not a problem and that it’s perfectly fine—“great” and “amazing,” in fact—for the White House to do everything it can to escalate the greenhouse gassing to death of life on earth.

The nuclear threat is rising now that Trump has appointed John Bolton—a frothing right-wing uber-warmonger and longtime advocate of bombing Iran and North Korea, who led the charge for the archcriminal U.S. invasion of Iraq—as his top “national security” adviser. As a candidate, Trump wondered aloud why the U.S. couldn’t use nuclear weapons and if the U.S. should equip Saudi Arabia—the most reactionary government on earth and the homeland for extreme Islamist Wahhabism—with nuclear weapons. Trump and Bolton hate Obama’s relatively sane nuclear agreement with Iran. Their determination to rip up that accord—another reflection of Trump’s wacky, white-supremacist obsession with destroying any and all accomplishments claimed by a first black president—threatens to generate a disastrous nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, the crazy orange-tinted Donald—who does (make no mistake) have a strange and potentially compromising history of Russian business dealings and who has behaved in suspect ways regarding Putin’s regime—has been convinced to expel dozens of Russian diplomats, leading to predictable Russian counter-expulsions.

The Clinton-Obama neoliberal Democrats and their many allies in the corporate media that helped create the Trumpenstein have spent more than a year running with the allegation that Russia magically subverted our nonexistent “democracy” to put Trump in the White House. The climate crisis holds little interest for the Trump and Russia-obsessed corporate media. The fact that the world stands at the eve of ecological self-destruction, with the Trump White House in the lead, elicits barely a whisper in the commercial news media. Unlike Stormy Daniels, for example, that little story—the biggest issue of our or any time—is not good for television ratings and newspaper sales.

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Trump’s lethally racist, sexist, nativist, nuclear-weapons-brandishing, ecocidal rise to the nominal CEO position atop the U.S.-imperial oligarchy is no less a reflection of the dominant role of big U.S. capitalist money and homegrown plutocracy in U.S. politics than a more classically establishment Hillary Clinton ascendancy would have been. It’s got little to do with Russia, Russia, Russia—the great diversion that fills U.S. political airwaves and newsprint as the world careens ever closer to oligarchy-imposed geocide (a project shared by petro-capitalist Russia and the petro-capitalist United States) and to a thermonuclear conflagration that the “Russiagate” gambit is recklessly encouraging.

What will historians say a century from now, if they still exist? That the most intelligent known species in the universe seemed to have lost its mind. We have come to the precipice of self-annihilation under the command of an imperial power committed like Herman Melville’s Ahab to the endless pursuit of hegemony even over and against basic imperatives of survival.